HRC responded to the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling in Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute that states can purge voters from the rolls solely on the basis of infrequent voting.

“The right to vote is the touchstone of our democracy and tactics designed to disenfranchise voters are dangerous to the health of our country,” said HRC Government Affairs Director David Stacy. “We are disappointed that the Supreme Court has upheld a law that could disenfranchise voters in Ohio and lead to similar laws that could impactmillions of voters across the nation."

The State of Ohio has a process in place that removes voters from registration if they have failed to vote or respond to a single address confirmation notice over a certain period of time. Voters are not notified when their registration is removed. As noted by the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund (NAACP-LDF) and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights (LCCHR), the National Voting Rights Act has been interpreted for more than two decades by the Justice Department, spanning Republican and Democratic administrations, as prohibiting mechanisms that would remove voters from the rolls based on inactivity and Ohio’s law reflects “no justifiable change in law or fact” to that longstanding interpretation.

The Human Rights Campaign supports coalition partners in the fight to preserve voting rights and continues to work tirelessly through campaigns like HRC Rising and HRC Project One America to register voters in states where voting rights are especially vulnerable.